Strategic research planning

Why is strategic research planning important for your institution?

It’s time to develop your institution's next strategic research plan. Throughout this process, you’ll need to draw from your extensive expertise, knowledge, and experience and consult many internal and external stakeholders across your institution. The result will be an indispensable blueprint for the research strategy that will guide your organization in carrying out and achieving its research mission, vision and values.

The strategic research plan will set tangible, quantitative goals, such as increasing funding expenditure, and define outcomes supporting your institution’s mission and vision. For example:

• Amplifying the societal impact of research in specific high-priority areas.

• Increasing competitiveness for interdisciplinary research through targeted recruitment and partnership strategies.

• Developing a refreshed rankings strategy.

What to consider when creating a strategic research plan?

Broadly, strategic research planning requires you first to understand:

If you reflect upon your last strategic plan, did you lack information sources or analytics? Were there any initiatives you would have altered if you possessed greater insight?

What happens in the strategic research planning room?

Imagine that you’re attending a strategic research planning committee meeting. The main focus of the discussion is potential areas for research expansion, and the goal is to pinpoint an area that aligns with your institution's research strengths and is also experiencing global growth.

During the meeting, various department leaders present conflicting perspectives, each offering compelling evidence to support their programs. How can you contribute insights that enable the group to better understand the research landscape, how each research area fits, and where the most significant potential or impact may lie?

It can be deceptively complex to answer these questions.

Planning committee members have an understanding built from their experiences, stakeholder interactions and research. But what other information can you and your teams draw from to minimize the risk of missing essential insights or potentially revealing new opportunities?

How does research output add value?

Drawing from a web of connected and current data and insights based on research output and bibliometrics, you can add rich detail to supplement your and your stakeholders’ expertise.

Strengthening your research strategy development with authoritative data and advanced analytics

What would it look like if your strategic research planning process included detailed bibliometric data and advanced analytics? With this, you could analyze and interpret additional details relating to your research programs' inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes, and impact and gain valuable insights to inform your plans.

Develop a telescopic and panoramic view

You could also get a panoramic view encompassing thousands of institutions while also having the ability to zoom in on specific groups or individual researchers' work.

Organizations that strategically incorporate detailed bibliometric data and advanced research analytics in their planning processes can enhance decision-making in areas such as:

• Identifying research strengths and opportunities for growth: a data-enriched view of the global research landscape can help you and your teams determine where you have a unique competitive advantage or untapped potential in a research field.

• Evaluating existing and potential collaboration partners: Committees with access to bibliometric-based research analytics can more easily identify outstanding cross-sector partners to maximize funding potential and help their research programs continue to thrive.

• Enhancing success rates in an increasingly competitive funding landscape: Bibliometric-based insights can help your planning committees identify potential new funding sources and investments in the ever-changing funding landscape.

Frameworks for strategic research planning

A six-step framework you can follow

Step 1: Situation analysis: Setting goals, objectives, and priorities for strategic research planning.

• Where do you want to be in three, five, or even ten years?

• What is the baseline of your institution's (university, faculties, departments, and research groups) performance against your current strategy, vision, and goals?

• What are your current research strengths and areas of niche expertise?

• Who are your crucial faculty and researchers?

• What is your performance in international rankings or national assessments?

Step 2: External environment evaluation: Understanding the local, regional and global research environment related to your organization's position and specific areas of interest.

• What are the strengths of critical peers/competitors (university, faculties, departments and research groups)? How are they performing?

• What is the research landscape in national priority areas?

• What fields of research are key funding bodies investing in?

• Who are the key contributors, and how much funding are your peers (research groups, departments, or schools) receiving?

Step 3: Internal environment evaluation: Detailing and assessing current strengths and performance through an objective and detailed lens.

• How are you performing against current objectives?

• Are your faculties, departments, research groups, and individual researchers spending research time in growing and well-funded fields?

• What is your collaboration and partnership profile? How successful are current projects?

Step 4: Strategy formulation: Developing specific strategies and initiatives to enable the institution to achieve its objectives.

• Which highly funded or nationally strategic research fields should you move into?

• Are there existing or potential partnerships in these fields that you can strengthen or pursue?

• Which faculty and researchers are well-placed to expand or establish activities in these fields?

Step 5: Strategy implementation: Ensuring the strategy is understood and executed effectively.

• Which quantitative and qualitative metrics and analyses will you use to set and communicate your baseline and objectives?

• What quantitative and qualitative metrics and analyses will you use to assess progress towards your objectives?

• Who will you benchmark against?

Step 6: Monitoring and evaluation: Keeping track of the strategy's performance, allowing room to pivot or change course effectively and where necessary.

• Are you using agreed quantitative and qualitative metrics and analyses to continually evaluate your performance against objectives and peer benchmarks?

• Are you using agreed quantitative and qualitative metrics and analyses to evaluate your existing or new partnerships

Harnessing insights for continuous improvement and impact

However, these instruments cannot account for unexpected factors, like weather or environmental changes. To ensure that the aircraft remains on the optimal course and to account for any unforeseen events, the aircraft must maintain ongoing communication with air traffic control (research office) and use their expert judgment to interpret and react to any updates received.

The air traffic control helps to confirm trajectory and guide necessary course corrections, ensuring a smooth and successful journey.

Are you the air traffic controller for your institution?

Across the globe, research activities produce a vast amount of information, indicators, and signals. The key is to efficiently gather, distill, analyze and extract meaningful insights from this extensive body of information intelligently and effectively.

This exercise isn’t limited to the beginning of each strategic planning exercise; it should be a continuous effort, extending across the inputs, processes, outputs, outcomes and impact of research programs.

Thinking back to the aircraft analogy, the senior leadership of a university, which includes senior research officers, is like air traffic control. They ensure the fleet of aircraft (the research programs) are safely taking off and reaching their destinations.

Assembling your instrument panel

Adding comprehensive and authoritative bibliometric datasets combined with advanced analytics creates a richer and more complete view of strategic research planning. In other words, you gain critical indicators on your instrument panel to improve your visibility into the progress of your many aircraft so you can identify which are in clear skies and which may be heading toward turbulent air.

Connected, bibliometric data analytics are particularly helpful to planning committees when they:

1. Define objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs).

2. Establish metrics that monitor and measure success.

3. Implement robust evaluation processes.

4. Evaluate progress and make ongoing decisions.

Additionally, using bibliometric-based data analytical tools empowers universities across their faculties, schools, departments and individual research groups to continuously and more effectively:

1. Track the progress of their research programs.

2. Identify opportunities for growth and performance improvement.

3. Celebrate research achievements and impact.

4. Take strategic decisions.

5. Allocate resources effectively.

6. Facilitate continuous improvement to build capacity for research excellence.

Is your panel connected to a network of signals, inputs and indicators?

In other words, what gauges and indicators will help you map and track the flights of your research programs? What are the signals, inputs, and indicators that will help you and your research groups respond to and continually adjust course to ensure they reach their destination?

Expand your view of the horizon

By harnessing authoritative, data-enhanced insights, universities can be confident that their strategic research plans are developed and built on a solid evidence base. With an infusion of data-driven insights, all the transformative factors that may affect research success, from outstanding talent and collaborations to increased success rates for funding applications, are easier to identify and achieve.

Returning to our earlier analogy of air traffic control and directing aircraft, universities require the quantitative signals generated by equivalents of radar and transmitted by ground towers, coupled with their teams' expert skills and judgment. Information from internal systems, the cockpit, and the people and external information is essential for safely reaching your destination. Information and insights derived from bibliometric datasets and associated advanced analytics constitute a vital component of this network of evidence. Without them, you can still operate the aircraft. However, with them, you expand your view of the horizon, gain a clearer perspective of your surroundings, and can maneuver more effectively throughout your journey to reach your desired destination and achieve your goals.

Tools are available to simplify this transformation process, offering insights that could otherwise be missed.